BeerSmith Questions

I purchased BeerSmith a while back and I have a few questions:

1) I see that it is basically a proram to create recipes to follow on your brew day, but what do you guys do to keep a record of eatch batch? Do you create a new recipe for each brew day? Is there a place to record the day it was transferred to seconday, the day it was bottled etc? ...or is that not what this program is all about?

2)I see northern brewer has promash files for their kits, is there any way to convert these to BeerSmith files?

3) Do most of you just create your recipe for the brew day and take this out with you when you brew or would it be more beneficial to have the laptop with you? I have uninstalled it off my old laptop and am trying to decide if I should wipe it, reinstall BS and make this my brewing computer or put it on my new machine and just take the recipe out with me.

1. Copy the recipe to the Brew Log. Make any changes to the specific batch there. Using it as a record of batches made is an integral reason for my having the software.

3. I print off the brew sheet for brew day. I scratch any specifics of the day on the paper and enter them later. For me, I see no benefit to taking the laptop along.

I just take the sheet, but I am a purposefully non-scientific, Luddite-inspired brewer.

I, too, use the brew log to keep track of a specific batch.

I take my laptop out into the garage. Recipe, mash calculators, music, and entertainment all in one.

Hammy71 said:

I take my laptop out into the garage. Recipe, mash calculators, music, and entertainment all in one.

Click to expand...

+1

I take mine outside and blair punk while I brew all day...I dont need to print out any papers. It's all right in front of me, Easy to take notes, and update/search HBT at the same time!

RandomSF said:

1. Copy the recipe to the Brew Log.

Click to expand...

This.

You can create folders to organize your recipes. When ready to brew, copy and paste to Brew Log.

Don't bother adding info into Taste Notes. It is a 256-character field -- not enough space to store adaquate notes. I put everything in the Notes field at the bottom. It will hold as much as you can type.